A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
SAIC faculty member Ginger Krebs.

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Ginger Krebs

Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

BA (1993), The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA; BFA (1998), School of the Art Institute of Chicago; MFA (2004), The University of Illinois at Chicago. Performances and Exhibitions: The Chicago Cultural Center; Steppenwolf Theater; The Dance Center of Columbia College; Loyola University; The Arts Club of Chicago; The Chicago Artists Coalition. Awards: Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award, Creative Catalyst and Individual Artist Support grants; Nina Frenkel Award for Faculty Excellence; MAP Fund; Chicago Dancemakers Forum. Residencies: Dance Studio Residency (Chicago Cultural Center); Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, California); The Bogliasco Foundation (Genoa, Italy); the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) (Florida State University-Tallahassee); MacDowell; Ucross; Ragdale; Djerassi.

Personal Statement

I make objects and performances that investigate how bodies cope with power. My research spans subjects as diverse as derivatives markets, football, Amazon Turk, the self-help genre, and “meat analogues.” Described as “inherently funny without having a clear joke to ‘get’,” my work celebrates people’s creative responses to constraints, and marvels at the everyday heroism of human beings who speak truth to power.

I build my choreography from vernacular movement that non-dancers can relate to. Humble source material, like a personal pattern of procrastination, for example, is given the “formalist treatment” to become complex, densely layered choreography.

I am preoccupied with power, and haunted by the way it hides behind capitalist ideology while enforcing visibility on other bodies, so my performances regularly feature radically unequal divisions of labor, mirages and scams. Lately I’m investigating how the ease we associate with the movement of onscreen bodies might reinforce confusions about socio-economic class—especially the idea that effort is low-status, while ease “comes naturally” to the elite.

In my role as a teacher, I like to listen. I want to help each artist recognize and be curious about their particular tendencies and interests. I have had to expand my own capacity to tolerate the feeling, while making, that I “don’t know what I’m doing.” This usually feels scary, but when I can allow myself to follow—usually it’s the ideas that seem either “dumb” or “unjustified”—that’s when my best thinking happens, and when what I make surprises me. I aim to facilitate students’ experimentation and creative research by striking a balance, in my classes, between intuitive response and thoughtful analysis.

Work

 

Vimeo

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.


Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

Class Number

1228

Credits

3

Description

In this course we will focus on the development of artistic research skills for students already engaged in a practice. Students take this required course in order to experience and develop a variety of research methodologies, both conventional and alternative, which include utilizing collections and archives in the School and the extended community.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.

Faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary, idea based assignments are designed to help students recognize work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Through this course work students will be able to identify the most productive research methods and making strategies to bolster their emerging studio practice. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

Class Number

1290

Credits

3

Description

Body As Site is a laboratory for body-based research. Students will be guided to expand the range of ways they move and the kinds of presence they can bring to live art by experimenting with balance, breath, vision, speed, continuity/interruption, and more. The class also introduces research and compositional strategies for generating and developing movement for performance. Working back and forth between improvisational and choreographic modes, students will develop projects that further their individual interests and goals.

Course work includes compositional games like the Viewpoints and somatic practices like contact improvisation and butoh. We will look at work by artists including Milka Djordjevich, Tatsumi Hijikata, Tere O'Connor, Okwui Okpokwasili and Jacolby Satterwhite, and documentaries like Paris Is Burning, Pina and Rize. Occasionally short readings will be assigned by writers like Eugenio Barba, Coco Fusco or Susan Rethorst.

Students will build performances by responding to objects, sites, rhythms, human collaborators and local live performances. By the end of the semester, students will have presented three substantial performances for critique, and produced many in-class 'micro-performances'- nearly one per week.

Class Number

2155

Credits

3

Description

This course is a laboratory for researching physical materials, and the ways that we might or already do interact with them. We will explore the materiality of our bodies by enacting Fluxus scores and inventing our own, experimenting with taste and touch, and investigating material states that elude clear classification, like the viscous. We'll make tools that extend the body's reach and alter its impact, and site performances in material environments that we build.

We'll consider object-oriented ontology (which maintains that objects exist independently of human perception) as we learn strategies for accessing non-human qualities of presence from Japanese butoh, bunraku and clown, which deconstruct human behavior in order to enchant the non-human or highlight the humor inherent in social interaction.

We'll considering the role of ritual objects as repositories for human desire, and reflect on psychological and symbolic relationships to materials in stories by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Franz Kafka. And we'll trace networks through which materials move between our bodies and larger environments, through readings, research presentations and field trips to study municipal infrastructure in the city.

Class Number

1517

Credits

3

Description

This class explores the relationship between language and physicality. It is designed equally for performance makers who want to develop their writing, and for writers who want to experiment with liveness.

Students will write in class - out of meditative bodies, out of sweaty bodies, out of self-conscious bodies, out of exultant bodies. They will also bring in found and original texts, and work with the body to activate and recontextualize them, to find correlations and contradictions that throw new light on their words.

The class aims to invite surprise by disrupting habitual postures and ways of moving and writing. By changing speed, scale, duration and context, the writing process will be strategically interrupted by action, and physical actions will be 'perforated' with opportunities for reflection. Attending to different sites in their bodies will offer students potent portals to memory, and readings that range from phenomenology to disability studies will offer further perspective and inspiration.

Class sessions will involve collaborative word games, instruction-based events, experiential anatomy, splicing together live and recorded speech (text to speech, live captioning, latency, and more), and traveling outside of the classroom to explore interactions between bodies and architecture.

Class Number

2450

Credits

3